Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes five days weekly with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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5.2.15

As policy-makers cast about for
ideas to stave off cuts into the hundreds of millions of dollars to Louisiana’s
higher education system, leaders in that sector are coalescing around the
entire sensible option of allowing
schools to raise tuition beyond the 10 percent allowable increase for this
upcoming fiscal year. That option needs to be taken.

Yes, with the state
ranked 18th among all states and the District of Columbia in per capita spending it’s clear that higher
education spends money inefficiently, primarily because of its overbuilt
nature. And it’s not like spending generally has not been increasing for higher
education in Louisiana: going back to former Gov. Mike
Foster's first
year, total spending on higher education to this past year
has increased 95 percent. During this same period, the inflation rate increased
only 51 percent. Adjusted for student credit hours
delivered, which gives an indication of output, the increase still is 63
percent. In other words, in the past 18 years, changes in spending on higher
education outpaced inflation.

Yet as previously noted, any plan
to rectify revenue shortfalls cannot be done hastily in the breech, as this
year’s budgeting task would dictate, so offered as a solution was the temporary
suspension of unproductive tax exceptions. However, the tuition-raising option
also makes sense. Under current law, because the Legislature oddly has a veto
power over tuition hikes, that was modified to allow up to 10 percent
increase unilaterally by institutions if they met certain performance
benchmarks. So, the Legislature could amend it to allow for something like a
one-time hike beyond 10 percent to help bail out higher education this year.

4.2.15

With more disappointing news coming
from their venture capitalist endeavor in addition to other questionable
actions, members of the Caddo Parish Commission may find themselves having to
pay the fiddler in reelection attempts this fall.

Last
month, in a public meeting scheduled to explain why a target hiring date of
employees of the beginning of 2014 by Elio Motors, and production beginning
first in the middle of that year and then at the beginning of this year, have
all been deadlines that have been missed, the company announced it was pushing
back the production start date again until early 2016. In 2013, through
a complicated arrangement, essentially an arm of the parish bought
discarded General Motors infrastructure as a site for the firm to produce a mass-produced
concept vehicle that has been described as anything from futuristic to a scam.

This could not come at a good time
for about all of the commissioners, most of whom who voted to put taxpayer
money on the line with the assumption the Elio arrangement would pay off in
terms of jobs and tax revenue, instead of being left holding the bag, because
of this upcoming election year. Worse, most also have been complicit in a
number of other decisions that were not in the taxpayers’ best interests.

3.2.15

This is starting to get ridiculous.
So is preventing your children from being tested over material learned during
the school year because the exam is structured around the Common Core Standards Initiative really striking a
blow against an intrusive federal government, corporate greed, lower standards,
or whatever bogeyman the standards are believed to be?

Yes, a very small number of
families have divulged intentions not to let their children take these exams at
the end of winter, including some in
Ouachita Parish.
Results from these are used to evaluate a significant number of teachers and
all public schools; in fact, absences lower these scores. They also provide a
marker for student progress.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, who was for CCSI
before he was against it, called upon the Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education to provide alternate
tests.
But that would be wasteful and meaningless, because such tests, even if
formulated in record time that could replicate the goals of instruction already
performed, would not be comparable to those that came before and will come in
the future, and BESE rightly disregarded the plea (which needlessly took the
form of a useless executive order).

2.2.15

Now that Indiana has made some
accommodation to Medicaid expansion partly on its own terms, the question
becomes whether this represents a sensible model for Louisiana to
embark upon its own version.

As originally formulated, refusing
to expand Medicaid through the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act (“Obamacare’) was a no-brainer. Even under the most optimistic
projections,
when the federal government went from the 100 to 90 percent reimbursement rate
by 2020, after that it would cost the state more money than without expansion
and its continuing to rely upon provision of uncompensated care for those
without insurance and ability to pay. By 2023 the cost to Louisiana would be
$68 million annually, growing at a rate of almost 15 percent a year. This means
in the decade of 2020-29 the state would pay an extra $858 million above and
beyond what it could. (And you don’t even want to consider the most pessimistic
projection, which puts additional decade costs around $4 billion.)

And, as it turns out, for care no
better than that consumed or not by the uninsured. As the study known as the “Oregon health insurance experiment” demonstrated,
Medicaid users in the aggregate on outcomes did no better than the same uninsured
patient population. This points to the necessity of reforming the
fee-for-service rationale behind Medicaid and the patient consumption behaviors
that it causes.

1.2.15

Former presidential candidate, U.S.
Senate candidate, U.S. House candidate, gubernatorial candidate, Ku Klux Klan
grand wizard, state Senate candidate, and former state Rep. David Duke has a
unique quality of becoming of sillier and sillier as time passes. Despite that,
Republican Rep. Steve Scalise
must be thankful Duke opened his trap about recent
controversy manufactured around Scalise involving the gadfly.

Keeping Duke away from publicity is
like trying to separate the cast of Keeping
up the with Kardashians from the gaze of a television camera, and so when
Baton Rouge local radio host Jim Engster invited
onto the air last week the guy who makes a living from other people’s
donations, he presented himself present and correct almost as fast as Pres. Barack Obama
walks back promises about red lines, closing detention centers, keeping doctors
you like, etc.

Duke was miffed at Scalise when the
latter had the audacity last month to offer a preemptive apology in case he
might have spoken to members of a group Duke fronted that evinced white
supremacist overtones. Given that the group essentially was unknown to many
Louisiana politicians, that it never publicized in advance his appearance, that
the talk had to do with tax issues, that the organizer of it said the invitation
came from a neighborhood association of his creation (dueling for attention
with a rival organization from which it had broken) and any group members there
had wandered in early, that any organization related to Duke who by this time any
connection to whom was toxic to any politician that would make any of them keep
as far away from this as possible, and Scalise’s own history of personal
comportment and principled politics, it’s certain that anything Scalise had to
do with the group was incidental and accidental.

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